My Move to Solid State

If you are dissatisfied with your laptop hard drive's performance, you should consider moving to a new state—solid state. Read on for head-to-head comparisons between a standard laptop hard drive and a solid state model.

I love small laptops. If you ask any of my friends, they
will tell you that even a laptop with a 12" screen, no matter how cool,
is just too big for me. My very first laptop was a Toshiba Libretto 50CT,
which was around the size of a VHS tape (for those of you who remember
those), and from there, I have progressed through the Fujitsu P series
with a P2110, P7010 and now a P1610—an 8.9" ultra-portable tablet. I
use this laptop as my primary machine with few complaints, but when I
made the jump to a tiny 8.9" tablet from my old 10.6" sub-notebook, I also
had to drop from a 2.5" to a 1.8" hard drive.

For me, especially at first, a 1.8" hard drive wasn't the end of the
world. Even though I had upgraded to 5400rpm drives on my other laptops,
to me, the decrease in size for the overall laptop was worth any drop
in performance. Plus, until recently, it wasn't like I had much
choice: 1.8" drives maxed out at 4200rpm. Then I heard about solid
state drives. Unlike a traditional hard drive that relies on a head and
a spinning platter, solid state drives act more like Flash storage you
might use in your camera or on a USB key. Not only are there no moving
parts to wear out and much faster seek times, the 1.8" solid state drives
I saw touted faster sustained read and write times as well.

Although I have read a number of benchmarks and anecdotes about solid state
drives, it always seemed like a mixed bag. Windows users talked about
much faster startup times and better overall responsiveness, while the
Mac reviews I read seemed to indicate the difference in performance was
minimal. I didn't see too many benchmarks about Linux systems, and with
the high price tag of solid state drives, I went back and forth on
which price point I was willing to pay.

One day I decided to take the plunge and bought a 1.8" Samsung solid
state drive for my laptop. In the process, I have taken some comparison
benchmarks between my old drive and my new solid state drive. Although
statistics can be handy, I decided to take a more tangible approach to
my comparisons. I used some standard benchmark tools, but the majority
of my comparisons deal with everyday tasks to give you a better idea
of what it's really like to have a solid state drive on a Linux system.

The Testing Methodology

First, I should tell you what hardware is being compared. All
tests were run on my trusty Fujitsu P1610. It has an Intel 1.2GHz ULV
Core Solo processor with 1GB of RAM and is running Ubuntu 7.10. The original
hard drive was a 4200rpm Toshiba MK6006GAH, and I am comparing it to a
Samsung MCBOE32G8APR solid state drive. When reasonable, I tried to run
tests multiple times so I could get an average reading; however, just
so you know, most of the tests ended up being pretty consistent between
tries. Also, when necessary I rebooted the machine before performing
follow-up tests so that any files Linux might have cached into RAM would
not affect the results.

Test 1: GRUB to Login

For the first test, I used a stopwatch to time how long it took the system
to go from the GRUB boot prompt to my login screen. Depending on how
you use your laptop, you may boot it every day, or you may hibernate or
suspend between uses. In either case, a slow boot time can be painful
when you want to get right to work. The boot process is both disk- and
processor-intensive, but even so, when comparing the results, you'll see
a significant difference:

4200rpm: 50 seconds

SSD: 34 seconds

Test 2: Login to Desktop

The next logical test is the time it takes from your login to a usable
desktop. For my laptop, I use the default desktop environment that comes
with Ubuntu (GNOME), but I also have terminals, applets and
Firefox all launching at startup. As a result, my numbers might differ
a bit from yours, but they give a good sense of the difference
between the two drives:

4200rpm: 59 seconds

SSD: 23 seconds

Wow. Although I knew to a degree that it took some time for my desktop
to come up with the old hard drive, I didn't realize until this test
that it actually took almost an entire minute! By comparison, the SSD
took less than half the time, in part due to the increased read speed
and the much faster seek times, especially when loading files at random
(see the bonnie++ test below to corroborate this). So far, the SSD is
looking pretty good. If you combine both tests, the 4200rpm drive took
109 seconds—almost two minutes—to go from the GRUB prompt to a usable
desktop, and the SSD took 57 seconds—almost half the time.

Kyle Rankin is a director of engineering operations in the San Francisco Bay Area, the author of a number of books including DevOps Troubleshooting and The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and is a columnist for Linux Journal.

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what a jackass comment that was. Obviously he didn't review 5400 and 7200 rmp drives. At least he took the time to write a review; something you wont do. Go buy a SSD and then YOU tell everyone else how that worked out for ya.

Great review. I've always been a fan of small laptops, too, and recently got a netbook. My only question is, does it make a difference what brand of drive you get? I've seen a couple sites talking about some serious performance differences...but I'm no expert on the subject, but I'd like a good deal if possible. Here's the best deals I've found on a 1.8 drive so far - http://bit.ly/5e7JWA but I don't know much about this brand. Any feedback?

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